


Working Theory

by cofax



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Related, Gen, outside pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-19
Updated: 2009-11-19
Packaged: 2017-10-03 08:41:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cofax/pseuds/cofax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i><span class="u">Theory No. 1:</span> Rape/burglary gone bad. The neighbor's death was a coincidence. This theory lasted about an hour. </i>  Spoilers for "Heart" and "Nightshifters".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Working Theory

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by Vehemently.

The call came in around noon. Peggy Fitzpatrick wouldn't have taken it, normally, except she was the detective of record on the Glen Markowicz murder. Two murders in three days, of next door neighbors? Had to be related. By the time she got to Minna Street, the building was roped off, two uniforms at the door chatting with the neighbors--underemployed slackers, mostly, taking advantage of cheap(er) rents in a "transitional" neighborhood that they'd convinced themselves was safer than it was.

"Ugly?" she said under her breath to Ling, who was on the door.

"Pretty clean, actually," he muttered back, as he led her up the stairs to the third-floor apartment. "Just weird."

"So?" she asked, as he opened the door and stepped back to let her enter. She'd beaten the coroner for once, so the airy living room was mostly empty. "Where's the body?"

"Through here," he said, and opened the bedroom door. Young dark-haired Caucasian female, arranged on the bedroom floor like a Christmas gift. Fully clothed, blood pooled under her back. The bed had been stripped; Peggy frowned.

Ling bounced a little on his heels, unfazed by the body. He had worked Bayview before moving to Central Division; nothing bothered him. "Check it out," he said, and led Peggy out of the bedroom to the hallway. The closet door stood ajar: when Peggy swung it open, using her elbow, she blinked.

It was completely trashed, as if someone had caged a bear in it. Shreds of cloth littered the floor, and both the plaster of the walls and the wood of the door were deeply gouged. As she watched, a chip of paint fluttered to the ground. The closet smelled pungently of dog, although kicking through the debris on the floor, Peggy saw no fur or feces.

She stepped back and looked again into the bedroom, at the dead girl, the blood dried in her rich brown hair and soaked into the tasteful geometric carpet. "Huh."

*

 

Theory No. 1: Rape/burglary gone bad. The neighbor's death was a coincidence.

This theory lasted about an hour.

 

*

 

The killer had cleaned up but good. "Nothing?" Peggy asked Hernandez, phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder. The coffee at her elbow was hours cold, and her stomach growled, reminding her of the BLT she usually permitted herself on Tuesdays.

"Well," he allowed, voice echoing over the speaker-phone in his lab, "not much. He wiped all the doors--knobs and surfaces, and the coffee mugs in the sink were clean. He didn't wipe the closet, by the way--her prints are all over it."

"But." She hated the way Hernandez liked to drag it out, serializing it for her like it was fucking _LOST_ or something. She hoped to god she got an answer that made more sense than those damned polar bears.

A self-deprecating cough and the shuffle of some papers came through the phone. "Well, yeah. Seems like our guy took a piss at some point. So I lifted a couple of prints off the toilet handle. Also, I figure he was there for a while--we found a garbage bag two blocks away with her mail in it, and a couple of used condoms. He'd stripped the bed, though. Smart guy."

She blinked, staring at her computer screen. "So, he had sex with her--multiple times? And then shot her?" Your garden-variety rapist didn't _usually_ stop to put on a condom, and Peggy hadn't seen any obvious bruising on the body. On the other hand, there were ligature marks on Hutchins' wrists: she'd been bound before she died.

"That's your lookout," said Hernandez. "I just find the stuff, you make sense of it."

"Wonderful," Peggy said, and hung up.

Madison Hutchins was already _in_ the system, Peggy realized: beside being Markowicz' neighbor, she was the woman who found Nate Mulligan's body at 555 California a month ago. Mulligan was her boss, in fact. She'd been interviewed by Wu and Sanchez, who had flagged her for a follow-up chat but hadn't gotten around to it yet. Peggy slouched in her chair and glared at the computer screen, ignoring the shouts from down the hall as Sanchez argued with a suspect. Pretty unlikely coincidence here, and the only connection Markowicz had with Mulligan was through Hutchins. And--holy shit--Hutchins was also Kurt Kneeler's girlfriend. This was way past coincidence: Hutchins was the key--but to what?

Cross-checking on the Mulligan case meant talking to Urqhardt in Animal Control, who swore (_On my mother's grave, Detective!_) that Officer Waterson and Kurt Kneeler were killed by the same animal as Mulligan. And all of them were missing their hearts, a fact that had carefully been kept out of the press. As it was, the Chron was freaking out about the rash of dog attacks in the city, the Chief had held a press conference, and the phones were ringing off the hook. Fuck, PETA was even involved.

If the Hutchins girl hadn't been killed, Peggy might have considered her a suspect. Her boss, her ex, and her neighbor were all killed in the last month. Except Madison Hutchins died by gunshot wound, exactly the same as Markowicz.

Christ, this was a mess.

The examiner's office was backed up--there'd been a drive-by in the Bayview the same day Hutchins was killed, and Peggy didn't want to start a political firestorm by bumping the murder of a white secretary up above the deaths of two black teenagers. But Glen Markowicz had been processed, even if the full report on the autopsy would take a couple of weeks. Peggy scrolled through her inbox until she found the email with the preliminary findings.

Reading, she picked up her coffee, started to take a sip, remembered it was cold, put it down in disgust. Close range with a .45 caliber, that was the same, although Markowicz was killed on the street, miles away. She hit the space-bar to page down, and then stopped. "What the--?"

Who the hell used _silver bullets?_

 

*

 

Theory No. 2: Hutchins had a stalker with a wolf-hybrid or a pit bull, and he used the animal to kill Mulligan and Kneeler, and then he lost the dog or something and used a weapon on Markowicz and Hutchins.

 

*

 

Canvassing the neighborhood was not entirely fruitless: Sanchez came up with at least three reports of a black 1960s sedan parked on the street. Frank Gomez, who lived mostly in the doorway of the Walgreen's two blocks down, swore it was a 1966 Impala.

There weren't any 1966 Impalas registered in San Francisco; nor any 1967, or 1965. Not that Peggy had expected it to be that easy. She filed a request with Sacramento for a statewide search; if nothing came back, she'd bump it up to nationwide.

Legwork did pay off, though. Kneeler's boss said someone came looking for him the day he died, a tall guy in a--ah-hah!--beautifully-kept black Impala.

 

*

 

Theory No. 3: Same as Number 2, except now Peggy had an individual in mind, if not a name. Mr. Impala, she'd call him.

Didn't explain the silver jacket on the bullets, though.

 

*

 

It wasn't like Peggy didn't have any other cases, but the Hutchins/Markowicz/Kneeler/Mulligan case just kept getting weirder and weirder. A week later, still waiting for the results from the partials they'd sent to IAFIS, she went down three flights of stairs, carrying an extra-large Americano and a banana-walnut muffin.

Janine Boyd, pathologist and nicotine addict, took her smoke break every day at 10:30, like clockwork. When she saw Peggy standing in the hallway, coffee and paper bag in hand, Janine rolled her eyes, and then took the coffee anyway. "Keep that," she said, nodding at the muffin, "I'm trying to lose weight." She led the way out the door to a spot sheltered by the eaves from the rain, and the legally-mandated 20 feet from the building's entrance. Peggy had heard a story about how some Irish tourists thought California hookers were really well-paid, because of all the professionally-dressed people standing on the sidewalks outside office buildings. She was pretty sure it was a joke.

"You want to know about Hutchins," Janine stated flatly, after three long drags on her cigarette and as many swallows of coffee.

"Whatever you can give me, Jan." Everyone did it, because everyone was in a rush, and it took so damned long to get the lab results back, but Peggy always felt a little bad strong-arming the examiners. Not bad enough not to do it, though.

"Not much to tell, really. One shot to the heart, at close range, died within three minutes. She'd had sex recently."

Peggy nodded. "You're sure there's no evidence of rape?"

"Seemed pretty consensual; no tearing, nothing like that. Although she'd been restrained relatively recently: she had ligature marks on her wrists and ankles. She wasn't restrained when she died, though, and there were no defense wounds on her, other than a shallow cut on her right arm--and that was healing when she died."

"Anything else?"

Janine looked uneasy, stubbing out her cigarette and dropping the butt into the can.

"What is it?" Peggy urged her. "C'mon, Jan--this guy is still out there."

Janine shrugged, tugging her coat closer; the weather had turned cool and rainy again. "It's not her, actually. It's the other cases that bother me."

San Francisco was too small a town to keep a lid on the case, not with four related killings in less than two weeks. Every day there was another article about Madison Hutchins in the _Examiner_, detailing her promising young life and her tragic death. The police, opined the _Examiner_, were failing to protect the women of San Francisco from domestic violence. The _Chronicle_ demanded new laws criminalizing stalking, or pit bull ownership, or stalking with pit bulls. And Peggy's voicemail box was like something out of _Tales of the Unexplained_\--crackpots and delusionals, only some of them able to string two coherent sentences together. "What about them?"

"About two weeks after the first death--the lawyer Mulligan--someone came to view Mulligan's body. He said he worked for Korman, so I showed him the remains--" she blushed a little, and Peggy raised an eyebrow. Must have been cute, then. "And then when Markowicz came in, I talked to Hernandez and he said that you'd caught it, and I thought it was weird--"

"Wait. _Who_ did you talk to?"

Janine looked away, shaking another cigarette out of her pack. "Tall young guy. Said his name was John Landis, worked in Homicide."

Peggy stared. "There is no one named Landis in Homicide."

"Well, I know that _now._"

 

*

 

Theory No. 4: Mr. Impala was running a con involving police impersonation and dog-fighting, and Madison Hutchins got dragged into by her ex, Kurt Kneeler. Landis--who must be Mr. Impala--killed Kneeler and shot Hutchins when she threatened to go to the cops.

But then why kill Mulligan and Markowicz? And why, despite the way the dog destroyed the closet, was there no physical evidence of the animal on any of the crime scenes?

 

*

 

It was damned cold in the morgue, which was the point, of course. A morgue was a morgue, and Peggy had been in too many: grey institutional walls, linoleum floor, and that ever-present odor of formaldehyde. There was an autopsy going on in the next room; if Peggy closed her eyes, she could just hear Janine's voice droning into a recorder.

Instead she kept them open, sitting hunched on an unstable plastic chair and staring at the unblemished face of Madison Hutchins. A beautiful girl, really: fine skin, big dark eyes, gorgeous hair. She must have been something, before death turned her grey and stiff, before a silver-jacketed .45 caliber bullet ripped through her rib-cage and tore a hole in her back. Same gun that killed Glen Markowicz: what a surprise.

Peggy now knew damn near everything there was to know about Madison Hutchins, more than most of her friends, anyway. She knew Madison's favorite books, the way she stuffed used tissues in the pocket of her jacket and kept reading glasses inside her desk so nobody saw them. She knew about the stash of chocolate in the freezer and the four vibrators in the nightstand, the porn on the laptop and the vanilla emails to her parents in Fresno. She knew that Madison could have gone to business school but didn't, made $53,500 as an executive assistant (just barely enough to cover the rent on that so-pretty apartment), and bought those nice clothes at a second-hand shop in the Richmond.

She knew that Kurt had been bad news, and that Kurt hadn't killed her.

"C'mon, honey," she whispered. "Tell me who he was."

They never, ever, answered back.

Probably just as well.

 

*

 

Theory No. 5: Mr. Impala was a classic Bundy-esque serial-killer, except he used a dog to kill those hookers in Hunters Point. He saw Madison Hutchins in the neighborhood one night and got obsessed with her. He saw Mulligan, Kneeler, and Markowicz as threats. And on the last day of Madison's life, he talked his way into her apartment and locked the dog in the closet...

Christ, none of this made any fucking sense at all.

 

*

 

Red's Java House was an institution on the San Francisco waterfront since long before Peggy Fitzpatrick was first walking a beat in the Haight. For under $10, you got a burger on a crusty sourdough roll, a cup of crisp and greasy fries, and an Anchorsteam. Peggy paid at the counter, took a handful of napkins, and walked out to the back patio. It was after the lunch rush and she had her pick of tables.

She stacked some of the file folders on the table and flipped the top one open, carefully avoiding the pool of ketchup for her fries. The wind fluttered her napkins and her sunglasses slipped down her nose.

This was ritual: on the tough ones, she had to take them outside, blow the dust out of her brain, shake something loose. Sometimes it even worked.

She put her beer on top of the Markowicz autopsy report and flipped open her day-planner. Okay, so Mulligan had died on March 5. "Landis" showed up in the morgue about three weeks later, asking questions. Then Officer Waterson was killed, and the next day Kneeler's body was discovered. That made it March 31. Which... Peggy sat back and stared at her notes.

Why was "Landis" asking questions about Mulligan after Mulligan had died? She was missing something.

And Landis... something about the name bothered her. She shrugged and went back to the calendar. Madison Hutchins died on Tuesday April 3, exactly four weeks after Nate Mulligan. Peggy tapped her pen on the day-timer, her burger gone cold.

Her day-timer was a yearly gift from her sister, and it came with lots of information Peggy never found very useful, like holidays and metric conversions and astronomical information. She flipped from April back to March, frowning. "Huh." Both Mulligan and Hutchins had been killed on the full moon. In fact, all of the deaths had fallen within three or four days of the full moon, on one side or another.

Peggy drained her beer, staring unseeing out at the container ship passing under the Bay Bridge. Markowicz and Hutchins had both been shot with a silver-jacketed bullet. And Hutchins' destroyed closet, with all the scratches on the walls.

"Well, that's kind of fucked up."

 

*

 

Theory No. 6: "John Landis" (how stupid did she have to be?) was a psycho who thought he was hunting werewolves. Which explained the bullets and the timing, and even the police impersonation.

It didn't explain why he'd fixated on Hutchins. Maybe she'd turned him down at a bar, maybe he had no reason at all. And it didn't explain the dog-attacks, or the destroyed wood-work in Hutchins' closet.

Still, a theory that fit half the facts was better than no theory at all. On the other hand, no _way_ was she telling the Captain.

 

*

 

Four weeks later, with no leads--but no new mysterious deaths--and five recent driveby shootings taking up ink on the front page of the Examiner, the prints finally came back from the FBI. There were two sets: one complete, one partial. The partials got a match, but not a useful one: the guy was dead, at least a year ago. The second set had no matches, but there must have been something there, because it wasn't two days after the results came in that Peggy got called to the Captain's office.

"Detective Fitzpatrick," said Captain Korman. "Nice of you to join us. I'd like you to meet Special Agents Hendrikson and Felse. They'll be working with you on the Minna Street murders."

_Shit._ "Nice to meet you," she said. Felse was the young one, she guessed: polished and arrogant-looking. Hendrikson at least looked like he had some experience. "Can I ask why the FBI is interested in our little brain-teaser?" Peggy suspected, looking at Hendrikson's sour face, that her 4 AM theory about a trained wolf wouldn't go over very well.

"Your prints turned up on my desk, Detective," said Hendrikson. "You've given us a lead on someone the agency has been after for months, a murderer and a bank-robber."

"My prints?" Peggy glanced uncertainly to the Captain, but he just gave her a bland look. No help in that quarter. "But the guy was dead, and you didn't have anything on the other set--"

"Dean Winchester is far from dead, Detective," said Felse, smiling in that condescending way Feebs had. "He robbed a bank and killed two people three months ago in Milwaukee. We have witnesses to his quite living state, although he did a very good job faking his own death last year. We suspect that the second set of prints are from his brother, Sam. They match some unidentified prints we have on file."

"Excellent!" said Captain Korman, picking up his phone and stabbing at the intercom. "Glad to see you're all getting along so well. Now, if you'll excuse me--Detective, see that you give the agents all the help they need, would you?"

Peggy stared at the Captain, and then at the feds. Hendrikson stared back at her, unblinking. Felse smirked.

Two hours later at Martuni's, Peggy bit her tongue and drank her beer.

"--chester's got a thing for silver weapons, we don't know why. But the Jane Doe in Milwaukee was killed with a silver letter-opener." Hendrikson wasn't exactly _affable_, but two beers had a way of loosening up even the tightest fed.

_Jane Doe?_ Felse butted in before Peggy had a chance to ask.

"These Winchesters," said Felse, leaning across the table--Peggy moved her beer out of his way--"are _bad guys_, Detective. They've left a trail of damage and death across the country a couple of times."

"You don't say," said Peggy. She took another sip of her beer. "And, what's your explanation for the five murders we're dealing with here? Why would these Winchesters kill all those people?"

"Five?" Felse looked blank.

Peggy counted off her fingers. "Mulligan, Hutchins' boss. Kneeler, Hutchins' ex. Officer Waterson, beat cop. Glen Markowicz, Hutchins' neighbor. And Madison Hutchins herself. Five; the first three were animal attacks, the last two gunshot wounds, from the same gun." Shit, they were the _FBI_\--why didn't they know this already?

Hendrikson shrugged. "We don't think those first three murders are related. We're just after the Winchesters, Detective: I'm sure San Francisco's finest can solve this rash of animal attacks without the assistance of the Department of Justice."

Peggy had six messages from Madison's parents on her voicemail, progressing from devastated with grief to outraged that there had been no arrests. And the feds were going to just write off all the other evidence in this case, in order to make it fit the theory they'd decided on from 3500 miles away. Well, that was just _splendid_ police work. Apparently justice for the dead, and closure for the living, didn't come into it.

But there could be a way to salvage this; after all, the FBI did have the data on these Winchesters. "I see. So..." she said after a moment, looking up from her beer. "Do these Winchesters have ... I mean, is there any chance they own a really big dog?"

Felse choked on a laugh and looked away. Peggy flushed, grinding her teeth.

Hendrikson stared at her for a long moment. "Detective, this is not _The X-Files_, and not all unusual crimes are evidence of a vast conspiracy. The Winchesters are simple murderers, if smarter and more dangerous than most. I don't know what you Californians think is acceptable police procedure, but I'd appreciate you not contaminating our investigation with your... _unorthodox_ speculation."

Peggy nodded once, twisting her lips into a forced smile. She swallowed the humiliation with the last of her beer and stood up. "That sounds great, agents." She slung her jacket on and picked up her bag for the walk home. "You be sure to let me know if you catch your Winchesters, okay? I'll be here, using my unorthodox speculation to solve the cases you can't be bothered with."

She let the door slam behind her.

Christ. Let the FBI put their blinders on: Peggy was _absolutely sure_\--well, okay, kind of sure--well, she had a theory, anyway--that Madison Hutchins' murderer was a stalker with a werewolf obsession, who owned a really big dog.

Yeah, that'd go over real well with the DOJ. Maybe this was _The X-Files_ after all. It was just that Peggy never expected to be the one cast as Fox Mulder.

**Author's Note:**

> Canon doesn't actually give us a date for Nate Mulligan's murder, and I thought it unlikely that he'd be murdered, it would make national news, the autopsy would be done, and the Winchesters could arrive to investigate, all within the same 3-4 day period in which the rest of the episode takes place. Which is why I shifted Nate's murder to the preceding month.


End file.
